Ask me questions about PPC!

[JJMcClure]

Hey, I thought I'd try to be a bit more useful around here, I can't really add much to discussions about site buying/selling since I don't do it but I enjoy posting on the forum due to the high level of posting that goes on here and want to do more than occasionally dip into 'foo' threads, as much fun as that is.

So, I thought I'd try to help people who are completely new to things like PPC since I've been doing that for years and driving traffic to websites is quite a common problem. I'd write an article about it but frankly it would be easier to just link to one already written by someone else so I thought it would be more useful to directly answer questions. Anything I get asked that I don't know the answer to I probably need to know, so I'll get something from this too.

I've been using PPC for a number of years and have worked out strategies that I feel work and are cost effective (and also ways of using PPC to do very cheap market research). I've never taken the "Google AdWords Certification Program" for the simple reason that I don't meet the $10k minimum spend per quarter that you need to qualify for it, I'm too good at keeping my client's costs down

Feel free to PM me too.

Rich

[Clinton]

Several posts in this thread - which sort of derailed the thread a bit (my fault!) have been split to a new thread about Starting a PPC Campaign To Advertise These Forums - A Practical Example.

Thanks to Rich and others who've been chipping in there to devise a strategy in public and build a sample advertising campaign.

So anyone has any questions on PPC? I'll kick the game off with one that's always confused me: Why do advertisers even bother with the content network on Google Adwords when the gripe seems to be that the content network doesn't pay?

[JJMcClure]

So anyone has any questions on PPC? I'll kick the game off with one that's always confused me: Why do advertisers even bother with the content network on Google Adwords when the gripe seems to be that the content network doesn't pay?

I almost always turn it off because I've found over the years that it has a much higher click through rate and low conversions, it's also vunerable to click fraud. It may be that my average client isn't suitable for that platform though (they're mostly SME's and commercial websites) but just recently I've had a couple that are suitable I think, an upmarket wine business and someone advertising their French aparment, both niches that I can see working as Ads on the kind of websites that Google would show them on so I've activated Content for those ones but with a much lower max bid price than on the Search network.

Advertisers have much more control over Content than there used to be though, now you can manually select sites for your Ads to be shown on and the reporting is much better than it used to be.